


The Flutter of Fortune

by lady_ragnell



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universes, Dreams and Nightmares, Gen, Human Disaster Matt Murdock, M/M, Pre-Relationship, Resurrection, The Defenders (Marvel TV) Spoilers, The Trousers of Time
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-04
Updated: 2017-11-04
Packaged: 2019-01-29 04:31:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,201
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12623256
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lady_ragnell/pseuds/lady_ragnell
Summary: Matt, when offered the choice between going back to his life and letting the world think he's dead, chooses life. If he weren't already sure it was the right decision, he starts having dreams about a world where he didn't come back.Some decisions, time keeps an eye on.





	The Flutter of Fortune

**Author's Note:**

  * For [k_bright](https://archiveofourown.org/users/k_bright/gifts).



> Written from a prompt for **k_bright** for a round of fic for charity, with thanks for the donation! Hopefully it captures the prompt right for you, though I can't claim Pratchett's facility with words.
> 
> Title from "Out of the Darkness" by Matthew and the Atlas.

Time keeps a close eye on some decisions.

They aren't the obvious ones. By the time war is declared, by the time a hole opens up in the sky, by the time a mask is put on, the decision has long been made. Time looks for lesser decisions. A right turn or a left one. A raised fist or an extended hand. It guides the path where it can.

Time doesn't care about heroes, not often. Their stories begin on the heels of the decisions of others, and by the time they wrest control into their own hands, events are on their course, for better or worse. The plane is already in the Arctic. The armor is already being built. The skin is already invulnerable.

But time cares about Matthew Murdock, bruised and scarred and moving like every breath is an ache, sitting in a quiet room with a nun with a gentle face and shaking hands. Her voice breaks the silence first. “It might be easier—for you, for everything—if Matt Murdock died that night. You could have a new life.”

Time holds its breath as he considers the lives before him. On one side, freedom, a woman who promises him dizzying, wonderful things. On the other, years of work, friends who care about him and want him to be safer than he prefers, friends who must be mourning. Foggy, mourning for him, and the smile that would come into his voice if Matt was alive.

And Matt Murdock, whose life was written out in the space of a single gunshot, someone else's choice in someone else's story, makes his decision.

*

Foggy cries when Matt shows up at his door. Matt winces with the guilt but can't help feeling a tinge of happiness too. If Foggy is crying for him, then there's still something there to save, and a reason for him to be alive, not across an ocean searching for Elektra. He holds on to Matt so tight his ribs creak, and he smells strange, like cologne someone else bought for him and ink. “God, buddy,” he's saying, over and over, “I thought that was it.”

“So did I,” says Matt, and knows that it didn't come out as a joke.

Foggy pulls back from him, and Matt wants to lean in, take more than Foggy offers like he always does and just hold on until it all feels real again, but he lets the distance between them grow instead, so Foggy can think. “Have you talked to anyone else yet? Karen, Claire—Luke or anyone?”

“No. Just you. I needed a miracle.”

“That's me, Franklin Nelson, esquire, miracle worker. What kind are you looking for?”

“A resurrection. Apparently I've been declared dead.”

Foggy's laugh is tinged with desperation, but Matt won't mention it. He'd do far worse, he suspects, if he'd thought Foggy had died. And if by some miracle Foggy was returned after that, he doesn't know what his response would be. “Yeah, I just wanted to get my hands on your estate, what can I say? Karen wrote a hell of an obituary, you can run it again next time you die. Just … how many people, exactly, are we resurrecting here?”

This choice was made long ago, has always been made. Matt's done fooling himself about that, even if it means burning a few bridges. “Two.”

“Okay.” Foggy sighs. “I figured, but I just wanted to check.”

“I'd expected you to object. You thought it killed me once already.”

“See, the thing is, I've already had my miracle today. Most people only get one, you know? I'm not pressing my luck.”

“I am. I need a place to stay as well as a resurrection. I've been gone a few weeks, I doubt my lease is intact.”

Foggy throws an arm around his shoulders. “I have a new couch that Marci has declined to defile, so your delicate princess nose will be in good shape while I bat my eyelashes at your landlord and also city hall. Though they should be able to deal with it, they resurrected Steve Rogers, so they can resurrect you.”

Foggy may smell off, but his apartment still smells familiar, like him, and Matt feels less like a ghost when he's surrounded by that familiar warmth. “I've got faith in you. You're the best lawyer in New York right now.”

“Till you get back in the game, right?”

Matt grins, steadied again by the familiar banter. “Yeah, you've got the idea.”

*

Matt still dreams, after so many years, in full color and form, and the return of his sight is the only thing that tells him he's dreaming, when everything feels so real and so cold.

The Foggy he sees in this dream isn't quite the Foggy he's dreamed about a few times before. The usual one is a conglomeration of patchily remembered faces from Matt's childhood mixed together with the familiar scents and sounds and assumptions. This Foggy doesn't look like that, looks like no one Matt ever remembers glimpsing.

He's sitting on the side of a bed in a room the shape of his bedroom, everything placed roughly where Matt thinks it all still is, and his face is buried in his hands. He's not crying, but Matt can smell the salt on the air that says he's just finished or just about to start.

After a while, he fumbles for his phone, calls a number. Matt's voice immediately gives his polite voicemail greeting, tinny through the line. “Come on, you stupid bastard,” Foggy says after the tone. “You're too goddamn stubborn to let one building kill you, right? You have to come back.”

Silence is all that greets him. After a minute, he hangs up, and dials another number.

Karen picks up after two rings. “Nightmares again?” she asks. It doesn't sound like she's been sleeping.

“You think he's still alive, right? You said at the funeral, and it could be true, maybe.”

“Oh, Foggy,” she says, through tears, and Matt wakes up.

*

“We need to talk about how to resurrect both you and Daredevil so the timing isn't suspicious,” says Foggy over breakfast the next morning, after clucking his tongue and plying Matt with coffee as soon as he came out of the bedroom. At least he didn't ask what had Matt so upset. Matt's dreams usually fade fast, but the memory of Foggy's despair is sticking with him, an uneasy weight in his chest but at least a reminder that he chose right.

“How do people think I died?”

“Danny Rand hired you as an independent legal counsel to look into shady dealings that his regular firm wasn't equipped to handle, you were supposed to meet a few people there that night and are presumed dead in the collapse. We just have to say you weren't there after all, or were only injured or had amnesia or something. Daredevil … they figured you were caught up in the same fight as Jessica, Luke, and the Immortal Goddamn Iron Fist, but that you weren't as lucky.”

“That was smart. The story about Danny, I mean.”

“Jessica's idea. She did a good job laying you to rest. Trish Talk did a great little piece on the death of a long-time hero of Hell's Kitchen, it's a damn shame only a few people got the joke.”

Matt smiles for a second, hoping it doesn't look as strained as it feels. “I hope someone recorded it, I'd like to listen. Do you have opinions on my resurrection?”

“You've got to come back first, if only for the sake of your lease. You're just lucky it's a hard apartment to rent, but even so I cleared it out a week ago, and you're lucky I didn't have the heart or the time to donate any of it yet.”

“And Daredevil?”

“I think maybe we can lean on Karen, ask her to break a story that makes it clear Daredevil was never actually out of play, just fading into the shadows again. Hate to break it to you, Matty, but people weren't exactly holding candlelit vigils over devil horn shrines in your absence.”

Matt shrugs. He's never done this for public adulation, just for public safety. “Do you think she'll be able to do it?”

“With a few favors from your vigilante punk band, she can probably pull it off in a way that other sources can even kind of verify. Danny's been on the streets doing some punching in your absence, but it's been pretty obviously not you, what with the glowing and all.”

Matt snorts, because after all the horror of those few days, all the changes that are going to be wrought in his life because of them, he can start to find Danny Rand's lack of irony about his position funny, at least a little. “Let me know if you need me to help work it out. I'm not quite ready to see people yet, besides you, but if they need to hear from me ...”

“They'll all want to. I'm going to call Karen before I call city hall, and Claire after that, and she'll update everyone else. Jessica's going to show up on my doorstep like a stray cat by the end of the day.”

“Do you have to work?” Matt asks, struck by the thought. “I don't even know what day it is.”

“I have a terrible stomach bug,” Foggy says dryly. “That's going to hold water for approximately three seconds when the news breaks, but I'm Hogarth's new patsy for taking care of messy vigilante cases, so she'll probably forgive me. If not—well, murdered by a scary, gorgeous woman is probably not the worst way to go. Is it the worst way to go?”

“Elektra ...” Matt swallows. “Elektra didn't want to murder me.”

“Okay, I get that.” Foggy's voice softens with sympathy, and Matt knows that soon he'll have to explain everything that happened, explain that Elektra left him on the nunnery's doorstep and left for parts unknown without any more questions. She wanted, under the building, before the end, to run away with him, to be together, and he's glad she didn't take him by force and stung all at the same time. Someday, she'll be back, and he'll have a choice ahead of him, but for now there's a reprieve. “Now, if you hold on, I'll make us an appointment at city hall and call Karen.”

*

By the end of the day, thanks to Foggy's extensive connections and a legal system that's had to grow more flexible about resurrections in recent years, Matt Murdock is provisionally alive again. Karen, when Foggy gets on her on the phone, threatens to come over immediately, and Matt talks to her for five minutes, lets her cry and apologizes and passes the phone back to Foggy, who soothes her into a promise about the Daredevil story, which she only allows on the promise that Matt will tell her the real one, even if she can't publish it.

Foggy must call Claire while Matt is meeting with the judge who, bemused and amused, is handling his resurrection, because when they return to Foggy's apartment she's there, with her medical bag clinking at her side. “I said I wasn't ready to see anyone,” he tells Foggy when they're still on the stairs, but he says it without rancor.

“Claire and I both agreed that nuns, while awesome, are not necessarily trained medical practitioners, so you should get a checkup. I'm supposed to deliver you to her and go get coffee so I have plausible deniability about medical malpractice in case she slaps you.”

Claire doesn't slap him when Foggy leaves them alone, but her voice is tight with anger even as she hugs him. “You're the reason I'm in this mess, so you don't leave it before I do. You get me? Luke's felt sick about it, all of them have.”

“I could barely get out of bed before yesterday.”

“Which is exactly why I'm here.” Claire sits him down, puts on her gloves, and the smells are starting to be comforting in the ways they aren't when Matt has to go into a hospital. In a quiet apartment with Claire there, they mean real healing, not danger, not his father's worries and cares, not terrible hurts to friends and family. Someday, he'll be able to tell her that. He owes her the words.

Claire is quiet and gentle through the whole examination, making reluctantly impressed comments about stitches and wound care for all his bruises and the cracked ribs that are only now, a month later, starting to let him breathe deeply. Daredevil won't be on the street for another week or two, unless the sounds that seemed so muffled in the nunnery start bothering him again.

“You look tired,” she finally says, rocking back on her heels and snapping her gloves a little as she takes them off. “Dying and coming back to life would do that to anyone, but I could get a friend to write you a prescription if you need sleep.”

“I've been sleeping for weeks. I just had a nightmare last night, that's all.”

She kisses him on the forehead. “Take care of yourself. You only get so many miracles.”

That's an eerie echo of Foggy, but Matt smiles anyway. “You're more miracle than anyone deserves.”

“And Luke actually knows it, which is more of a miracle than _I_ deserve. Call me if you need me, Matt. We didn't stop being friends just because I moved to Harlem. Danny and Luke have been talking about Danny maybe sponsoring a clinic—for neighborhood kids who can't afford it by day, for you guys by night. They were going to call it the Matt Murdock clinic, but I am going to talk them out of that now. In a few months, you could stop by and see me there.”

“If I need the help, I will. And you should definitely tell them not to.” Matt smiles. “What about the Night Nurse Clinic?”

She smacks him gently in the knee where she definitely knows he has a bruise. “Yeah, you're going to be just fine.”

*

Matt is dreaming about a dark room (and a glowing alarm clock, and light creeping around the edge of blinds, so he knows it's a dream) and about Karen breathing in the dark, too fast and panicked to even be trying to sleep. She sits up, pulls something out from under her pillow, fingers it a little, and he smells gunpowder.

A phone lights up, an older model from the sound as it does, and he can see her face in the light of it, and in the way of dreams the text at the same time. _All clear, ma'am,_ says the text, and Matt has enough time to be stung and confused and wary before another phone lights up, ringing in the night.

Karen sighs and picks it up. “Again? Foggy, you need to talk to someone.”

“Someone from the precinct called today to ask a few more questions. You might get a call too. About why we got stuck in the police station with the loved ones of the rest of the people defending the city, about why exactly Matt was Danny's choice …”

Karen hisses. “You think someone knows? Or suspects?”

“Not really. How could they? But I don't like that they're asking, and then I had that stupid dream—”

“What tonight?”

Foggy's sigh is long and hard across the line. “Just that he was sleeping on my couch. God, how stupid is that? He hasn't done that since … well, since before he put on that mask, I'm pretty sure. But it was so vivid.”

“Do you need me to come over?” Karen is already halfway out of bed, putting the gun back under her pillow, reaching for the burner phone that Frank texted her on, assuring her that some kind of patrol went well. Maybe Danny isn't the only one who's been taking Matt's duties on.

But this is just a dream. Matt knows he's dreaming because he can see Karen's worn-down face as she turns on a bedside lamp. Foggy's voice sounds just as worn-down. “No. No, get some sleep. I know you aren't sleeping either. Maybe coffee later this week?”

She reassures him, soothes him, sends him back to sleep, and stays sitting up in bed, in the light. She taps out a response to Frank, screen tilted in a way he can't see, and stares for a long time at the covered window. “Fuck you,” she finally says, and Matt wakes up.

“You okay, buddy?” Foggy says, in reality, where Matt's eyes don't show him anything but his other senses paint a picture of Foggy standing in the bedroom doorway with a glass of water and his face damp like he'd been splashing water on it. “You were breathing hard there.”

“Just a nightmare. I'll be fine,” says Matt, though he's not at all sure about that.

*

It takes three days to fully resurrect Matt (three nights of increasingly horrible dreams about Foggy, about Karen, about Claire crying on Luke's shoulder), and on the night it's done, Foggy takes him out to dinner when he gets home from work.

“Congratulations on once again being a tax-paying, if unemployed, citizen. You're lucky I didn't keep everything you left me in your will. Speaking of, next time can you maybe leave your blood money to charity? I don't want it.”

Matt winces. “I know you worry about your family, about debt, and I thought even if I couldn't help you any other way—”

“I would rather have you alive any day, and I don't want any of that fixed by you dying. Besides, I'm making bank on the sellout life at this point. Apparently the Immortal Iron Fist needs a lawyer separate from certain other people, so I'm racking up billables figuring out legal shit related to K'un L'un and also how to protect the dragon bones that apparently ended up under our city. You realize your life makes no sense? And that by extension mine doesn't either? You're the worst.”

Matt lets him change the subject, laughing a little about Foggy's reactions to mysteries and knowing how much Danny's attitude about them all must infuriate him. Danny has called him a few times since he woke up, but Matt doesn't know what to say to him. Luke called once, and left a calm, welcoming voicemail. Jessica hasn't called, but Matt might call her in a day or two. When he's had more time.

It's still strange, being alive, but he thinks about the dreams that still feel unsettlingly real, and he never looks back at the choice.

*

That night, Matt dreams about a prison, and about Wilson Fisk, as clear as if Matt was sitting across a table from hm. Like everyone else he sees in these dreams, Fisk doesn't look like Matt imagined him, like a dozen people mixed together into the right shape. “It's confirmed, then,” he's saying to a man Matt doesn't recognize. “Matt Murdock and Daredevil disappeared on the same night.”

“Matt Murdock is dead, and if the Devil of Hell's Kitchen isn't, he hasn't made himself known, either,” says the man, still no one familiar, another one wearing inmates' clothing.

“It makes sense. They've both been thorns in my side. If word were to get out …”

Matt wakes up into a world where Karen is supposed to drop her exclusive on the Devil's interference with several local drug operations in less than twenty-four hours, where no one will ever connect those dots, but he wakes in a cold sweat nonetheless.

No one would have made that connection if he'd stayed dead. They would have had no reason to. He tells himself that until he falls asleep.

*

The next day, Matt moves back into his old apartment. He's preparing himself for a long day of taking everything Foggy had put in storage, going back and forth in Foggy's uncle's car, but when they arrive with the first load, Jessica and Luke and Danny are already putting his furniture and his cupboards in order, with help from Claire and Colleen, who's the first one to approach him, with her hand out, knowing he can tell that it's there for him to shake.

“I'm happy you're okay,” she says, and he knows her the least of anyone in the apartment, not that he knows the others that well, but he still has to swallow before he nods and shakes her hand. “I know you weren't ready to see anyone, but—”

“But that's stupid,” says Jessica from somewhere in the middle of the room, where his senses tell him she's picking up his couch all by herself while she makes sure it's just where he left it. “You die, you don't get to tell people you don't want to see them. Call this the open-casket funeral. You look pretty good for a corpse, Murdock.”

“I wouldn't know,” Matt says with his most charming smile. “Thank you—all of you—for helping with this. Foggy tells me everyone else made it out of the building and the police station okay?”

“He was right,” says Luke from the kitchen. He seems to be cooking something, probably lunch for everyone, and Matt hates having people in his space, disordering the things he needs to be able to find by touch alone, but he knows Luke will ask him carefully where every item goes. “Franklin, how's it going? Everything fine?”

There's heaviness there, a story not yet told, but Matt doesn't press, just lets Foggy launch into a story about Hogarth raking him over the coals for taking off work to take care of Matt.

Danny captures his attention next, telling him seriously about the patrols of Hell's Kitchen he's been making in Matt's honor in a way that's meant to sound like assurance and only makes him sound like he needs reassurance, which Matt provides with a tight smile and a private worry that Danny's training didn't prepare him for any enemies but the Hand, black and white fights that were never as black and white as they seemed.

It's a long afternoon—too many conversations, too many people's eyes on him—but at the end, when everyone's leaving so he and Foggy can put the last few things to rights, Jessica punches him in the shoulder, gently for her but hard enough to make him sway. “Don't do that again,” she says, and brushes past him out the door.

*

“Shit,” Foggy is saying in a dream. He's always the same in these too-vivid dreams, always a person Matt never knew as a child, and Matt is increasingly sure and increasingly frightened that it's his real face. “Shit, Karen.”

“It's just tabloids.”

“But it's getting passed around, it's getting picked up.” And over Foggy's shoulder, on his phone's screen, Matt can read the screaming headline: _JUSTICE WAS BLIND?_ “Has Ellison mentioned it to you?”

“Yes.” Foggy swears again, pounds his fist on his kitchen table. Foggy's first instinct is never violence (that's always been Matt, will always be Matt), and the movement is startling. “But it's all just unsubstantiated rumor, no one knows where it's coming from—”

Matt knows.

*

Karen's story about the Devil of Hell's Kitchen breaks. It's a story about a smuggling ring brought down through careful planning and observation, a witness delivered to the steps of the _Bulletin_ again like the Devil wanted to make sure everyone knew he'd never left. The witness is willing to turn state's evidence, corroborates seeing the Devil multiple times, giving him information, noticing the black blindfold from where he was perched on a nearby building.

Danny disavows all knowledge, according to Foggy, and they share a troubled silence, thinking about Frank Castle, about Karen, about the secrets they all keep from each other.

“I've been having dreams ever since I came back,” Matt finally says. “About staying dead, and about how that was for you, for Karen, for everyone. I dreamed about Wilson Fisk making the connection between me and the Devil, without a story like this.”

“What happened next?”

“I don't know. That worries me.”

“Me too. But it won't happen, because Karen's a badass reporter and nothing is going to get in her way.” Foggy fidgets for a moment, anxiety leaking into his stance, into the air. “Were you thinking about not coming back? I mean, that's stupid, I know you were, but that seriously?”

“I thought—I still think—it might be easier for you, once the worst was over. And it may be the only way I could have stopped being the Devil.”

“You would have been something worse instead. Not being the Devil means Elektra, right?”

He still misses her like an ache whenever he thinks about her, but he knows she's alive. He knows she's herself. He knows she's looking out for him. All of that helps take the sting out of the missing. “Yes.”

“I think that's a shoddy way to frame your case, but I'll allow it for now. Just wait till you use up all my so-happy-you're-alive goodwill, you'll have to go back to doing your own laundry and trying to convince me that you're not breaking your lawyerly oaths.” Foggy nudges him. “The dreams are bothering you that much?”

“Maybe because I want to believe that if I'd died things would have been okay. I wouldn't have been exposed, you would have moved on with your life and so would Karen ...”

“Come on. You know that was never going to happen. That's why you came back.”

“Partly.”

“I'm kind of honored that we all outweighed Elektra.”

Foggy outweighed Elektra, a striking and guilty thought. In the end, when he opened his mouth and said he was going back, it wasn't a careful thought based on one person to one side of the equation and a community and friends if he had the courage to reach out for them on the other. It was the thought of Foggy's happiness, and that seemed to obliterate the other side of the case completely. “Elektra doesn't get me beer when I run out,” he says, in leading tones, and Foggy's laugh is a reminder of just why he came back.

*

“Foggy,” Brett Mahoney is saying on the phone, “I don't know what kind of shit you're mixed up in, but I don't know if I can help you with it. They're finding way too much evidence connecting Matt and the Devil, and if Matt goes down, you go down with him. You want to make a deal as fast as you can, I promise you that.”

Foggy is tossing a softball in the air like he does when he needs to think, and Matt, watching for the first time instead of just hearing it, is mesmerized by the flex and give of his muscles, the perfect complement to the steady, rhythmic thump of sound. “That's adorable, Brett, did the DA tell you to call me?”

“My mom told me to call you because someone was talking about the Castle case on the radio and said that everything Murdock did in the courtroom needs to be called into question.”

“Brett,” Foggy says with infinite patience, and Matt knows whatever is going to come out of his mouth next will be a lie without even bothering to tune into his heartbeat. “Matt is blind. In what world do these people think he could be the Devil of Hell's Kitchen?”

“Look, there's a lot of precedent right now about chemicals getting dumped on people and them suddenly getting ninja skills, that's all I'm saying.”

“Are you talking about that TV show with the turtles?” says Foggy, but he's frozen now, the softball held in his outstretched hand. Matt is almost more fascinated by his hands than by his face, and has to tell himself that this is a dream, that Foggy's hands might not have just that pattern of callus, just that ink stain on the side of his index finger. “Also, it's cute that you're trying to do the fancy lawyer talk. We do precedent. You do evidence, right? That's what police are for? So get some goddamn hard evidence and maybe we'll talk.”

_Rumors grow that Hell's Kitchen lawyer may have been Daredevil,_ the headline buried a few sections deep in the _Bulletin_ left on the table reads.

Brett is still talking, wheedling, when Matt wakes up.

*

Matt's phone tells him it's a blocked number calling, and he picks it up and isn't surprised to find Elektra on the other side. “Matthew,” she says, taking pleasure in the syllables, rolling them off her tongue like she always does but even more now. “I wanted to make sure you made it home safely, and give you some time to settle in.”

“Elektra. Thank you for taking me to the nunnery.”

“Sister Maggie is an interesting woman. And I thought perhaps you might like to make the choice.”

“I appreciate that as well.”

“You let me choose my path, even if you tried to convince me otherwise. How could I do any less for you?” Her voice softens. “Do you wish you'd come with me?”

“I dream that I did. Every night.”

“Are they good dreams?”

“They're nightmares.” She makes a low noise, more curious than wounded. “They feel true.”

“I wouldn't be surprised. There are many mysteries in the world, and I've only learned a few of them so far. I have plenty of time to learn others, though. Tell me you miss me, Matthew.”

He swallows. “Of course I do.”

“Then I don't mind so much that you chose your Mr. Nelson and your Ms. Page. I have the time to be patient, now. If you ever decide to find me, I'll make it very easy for you, I promise you that.” There's a confusion of noise on her end of the line. “Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a few things to take care of. Be well. I'll speak to you soon.”

She's laughing as he hangs up the phone.

*

That night, like he called the dream to himself, he dreams he's in a nest of blankets in a warehouse somewhere that smells of must and oil, tucked against Elektra's side. She's murmuring plans and praise into his hair, and he's smiling. He thinks it must be him, anyway, recognizes his father's features in his face, recognizes the fighter's body he's built for himself.

“I know you miss them, but all is well,” she says, and the Matt in the dream only twitches a little at the lie.

*

Matt is glad to return to his life, to his friends, even if Karen seems to be avoiding him as much as he's avoiding her and the question of Frank, but he finds, as Foggy spends more time at work again, that he's bored in the same way he was after Nelson and Murdock closed. He doesn't have a job, just Elektra's money to live off of, and while he goes out at night, it's just to let himself be glimpsed, not to find any problems. Not yet. He still has to tread carefully.

But he's bored, and he can't ask Foggy for work when the last job brought him Jessica and the whole problem in his lap. He can't ask Foggy for work when he has the fresh memory of Foggy frozen in the middle of his living room, a softball in his hand, hearing Brett tell him that his life's work could be undone.

When Jessica pounds on his door one morning, it's a relief. “Client needs legal advice, you're on retainer and getting paid in whiskey. Come on, we have a meeting at ten.”

Jessica is abrasive, but she's giving him the work she needs, doing him an awkward favor, so he goes with her, dressed and straightened up and ready to meet clients. They're a young couple, the woman clearly in awe of Jessica, and explain that their landlord has been screwing them over on repairs after the quakes and that Jessica has been finding evidence of that for them and now they need Matt to put pressure on.

Matt spends the day in Jessica's rank-smelling apartment, smiling at Malcolm when he shows up and seems quietly delighted that he's there and helping Jessica with a job, calling Foggy twice because property law was always one of Foggy's stronger suits and it makes Foggy sigh with relief to hear he's working and engaged in a case unlikely to get him in trouble.

At the end of it, she slaps a check into his hand. “It's for five bucks,” she grumbles when he thanks her. “Whatever, I have celebrity financing, I can afford a cheap lawyer.”

“Two hundred an hour is pretty cheap,” Matt says, and she barks out a laugh before threatening to take the check back. “Let me know if the Lewises need my help again.”

“Like I said, you're on retainer. Get your ass back here twice a week at least, but after noon. Private investigating is a nighttime business.”

Mentioning her kindness would only make her uncomfortable. Matt grins instead. “Let me know if you need any other services too.”

“What, like sexual ones? Or the other kind of horny ones? Thanks, but I think Nelson would kill me if I tried either one.”

She sounds triumphant enough that she must know how much that thought strikes him, and the next thing he knows he's been ejected from her apartment and has nothing to do but think about that the whole way home.

*

Foggy is on the wrong side of a table in the police station, sitting with head bent and hands clasped in front of him. He's not chained, but he's defeated, and the officer across from him is watching him in something like pity. “Mr. Nelson, you and Mr. Murdock were friends for years, and business partners too. If his cases are going to come under review, that means your cases as well. If you knew he was Daredevil ...”

“It would save you all some work,” Foggy says, resigned more than bitter. “Now's the part where you tell me that Hogarth already cut me loose to cut her loss, that the court of public opinion is already decided, and that if I just give up my best friend, I won't face criminal charges, just the loss of my livelihood and my reputation.”

“I wasn't going to insult you by saying it, since you already knew it.” The officer sounds vaguely familiar, but not familiar enough to be from their usual precinct. All the ones there know Foggy too well, might be compromised by that. Or maybe they're all under investigation too, since Matt works with them sometimes. “What do you have to lose, Franklin?”

Foggy closes his eyes. “Pretty much nothing, at this point.”

*

Matt shows up at Foggy's office around lunchtime the next day and has the bad luck to run into Marci on the steps, leaving as he stands in the lobby waiting for the receptionist to page Foggy down. She stops in front of him and he tilts his head like he doesn't know who's there. “I'm sorry, is someone there?”

“You fucked him up really bad, Murdock,” says Marci, and she's always sharp, but now she's menacing, and he remembers a party in law school when she told off someone who was spiking Matt's drink, and the way he thought that he never wanted to be on the wrong side of that tone of voice. “Three times now, by my count, though I'll admit the dying was the worst.”

“I couldn't exactly control that one.”

“Then control the other ones. I'm not going to try to tell him to drop you, I know how stupid that would be, but you know what he deserves and whether you're giving it to him. Think about that.” She sighs. “Glad you're alive, by the way. I guess I should say that.”

“Thank you for looking out for him,” Matt says, off-balance at the whole conversation. He knows Marci cares for Foggy, that he's one of the few people she genuinely _does_ care for in a world that hasn't treated her kindly. It's good to know that extends to fighting for him even when it means she has to let down her walls a little to do so. “And I'll try.”

“Trying doesn't do shit,” she calls over her shoulder as she walks away, and Matt hears Foggy talking to someone in the elevator as it comes down to the lobby. He sounds happy, arguing a point about a case. He's not sitting in an interrogation room, buried in misery and seconds away from giving up his career to stay a free man, all because Matt didn't cover his tracks well enough.

He will from now on. He'll talk to whoever he has to about making sure Matt Murdock and the Devil are two different people in the public's eye, just so Foggy never ends up there, even if he dies again.

With that goal in mind, he puts a smile on his face before Foggy steps out of the elevator, ready to greet him and offer to pay for lunch now that he's in control of his own finances again. Foggy calls his name, joyful, and Matt's grin stretches, becomes real. Foggy is safe. Matt is with him, and somehow, for once, that's keeping him out of danger.

*

Foggy is sitting in a holding cell, and he's alone. No one is talking to him. His phone isn't going to ring, because it's no doubt sitting in a box in an evidence room somewhere.

Matt sits down on the bench next to him, even though Foggy can't see him. “This isn't happening,” he says, and it's the first time he's tried speaking in one of the dreams. Foggy jerks a little, coming to attention, but his wild look around doesn't show him Matt. “I came back, none of this happened. I kept it from happening.”

“Jesus,” says Foggy. “I thought ...”

“Foggy.” He touches Foggy's arm, but Foggy only flinches a little. “I get it,” he tells whatever might be listening, whatever might be watching. “I would have ruined everything if I stayed away. You don't need to tell me that. I just came back because I knew it would make me happier.” He turns back to Foggy. “You make me happier. I came back for you.” But maybe he should tell that to his own Foggy, not the one his imagination has constructed. This Foggy, though, is the one who needs comfort. “The real Matt, he came back. I'm sorry this one didn't.”

“Matt?” asks Foggy, wondering, awed, meeting Matt's eyes for the first and only time in their lives.

Matt wakes up.

*

He can't go back to sleep, and doesn't really try. Instead, he puts on his suit for the first time since he came back, the one Elektra delivered with him to the nunnery, in a box she told everyone but Sister Maggie not to open. He goes out to the streets, and lets himself be seen. Reminds Hell's Kitchen that he's there, that he never left.

Far away, across the rooftops, he can hear Danny. Even farther, he thinks he catches the acrid scent of gunsmoke. Somewhere, Jessica is drinking or watching over someone or both. Somewhere else, Luke is sitting with Claire or going out to try to save one more soul, the most heroic of all of them even if none of them will ever be able to admit that.

Matt travels rooftop to rooftop and doesn't let himself pause over Foggy's building, because someone might be watching. Someone might connect them. They both have too much to lose, and Matt doesn't know why he's been dreaming what he has, but it's only made him more determined that no one should ever know who he is.

He only goes home when the change in traffic patterns tells him dawn must be coming, and he doesn't try to sleep then, either. He just changes clothes and goes back out walking, exploring all the streets he calls his, the ones he almost left to go with Elektra. They're his, not Fisk's, even if he knows prison can't hold Fisk forever and that he'll be a problem to reckon with, again and again.

He only realizes it's Saturday when his phone starts playing Foggy's name and he has to fumble to pick it up. “Foggy, hi. What can I do for you?”

“You can meet me for some delicious French toast, that's what you can do for me. By which I mean you can take a subway ride with me and we can go to Danny and Colleen's because apparently they think we should all bond, and I know you don't think that's a great idea, but if they talked Jessica into it you have no legs to stand on.”

“Jessica is coming?”

“Trish is coming, so she'll force Jessica's hand. Trish and I have joined forces, you should be very afraid.”

Matt still thinks it's a bad idea, but relying on the others might be one way of keeping Foggy safe, and maybe if Foggy knows them, he'll feel more comfortable with the Devil. “I'll meet you at the station in fifteen,” he says, and Foggy makes a few triumphant comments and hangs up on him.

Foggy is in a good mood when Matt meets him, either happy that he feels like he beat Matt by making him make friends with the other heroes protecting his city or just happy in general. Matt catches the mood from him, lets him draw Matt back into waking reality, a world where he made the choice that he's increasingly sure was the right one.

“You're happy today,” Foggy observes as they move through the station and get in line to catch the train.

“I'm alive,” Matt says with a shrug, as much of an explanation as he can make without sounding silly.

He can't see Foggy's grin, not while he's awake, but he can hear it. “Yeah, I guess you are.”

Matt reaches out not to take his arm, as usual, but to take his hand, and after a moment of startled stillness, Foggy's fingers wrap around his.

*

Matt's dream is jumbled and golden, a memory of the morning's lunch mixed in with a memory of his father making pancakes. He hears Jack and Jessica talking, listens to Claire and Luke and Colleen and Trish all laughing over something, Danny trying to talk over it. He turns to his right and Foggy is there, not quite the same Foggy he's been seeing since his resurrection but a different one, a more familiar one influenced by those other dreams, and Foggy is smiling at Matt, waiting for him to answer a question Matt doesn't quite remember hearing. He smells French toast and grapefruit and the leather of a worn-out punching bag, and he wakes up smiling. 


End file.
